OKLAHOMA: For an Old Debt

As a landholder and lawyer 42 years ago, ferocious, bull-voiced “Alfalfa Bill” Murray presided at the birth of the State of Oklahoma.

It was a hard birth. At the constitutional convention there were fights over county boundaries, dire threats against Alfalfa Bill. Afraid that the Republican governor of the Oklahoma territory would tamper with the new state’s constitution, Bill-walked off with the original document in his pocket. To guard Murray and his papers friends formed a brigade of 5,000 citizens, dubbed themselves the Squirrel Rifles. Everyone said the brigade was a joke, but it was a joke with a point. No one fooled with Alfalfa Bill. The state was born pretty much along the lines which Bill had planned for it.

The convention had cost Bill $4,000 of his own money, which he had raised by mortgaging his alfalfa-planted ranch in Tishomingo in the Chickasaw country. Bill never thought much about money, and never got his money back. The suggestion was made in Oklahoma’s first legislature that the state reimburse him, but Bill, scowling over his handlebar mustaches, didn’t think that would be “circumspect”: he was the legislature’s speaker. “Let’s leave it to some succeeding administration,” said Alfalfa Bill.

With Cigar & Mustaches. But succeeding generations never got around to it and Alfalfa Bill was too busy to give it much thought.

Irascible and abusive, trumpeting social theories with a black cigar upthrust from under his bushy mustaches, he roared through three decades of Oklahoma politics. He served two terms in Congress, twice ran unsuccessfully for governor, borrowed $40 in 1930 to run again and won, and offered himself in 1932 as a Democratic presidential candidate. In 1935 he faded into the background, nursing a hatred of the New Deal.

After that just about everyone forgot Alfalfa Bill. He wandered between Tishomingo and Oklahoma City—a skinny, bent figure almost lost in a bundle of mufflers and disheveled coats, a cigar stub still sticking out from under a now straggly old mustache. He spent his time writing long and scholarly books on politics, history, and economics, and peddling them to his friends.

He showed up, ragged, half-blind and half-deaf, at the Dixiecrat States’ Rights convention in 1948. Stubbornly he refused to let any of his four sons take him in.’To anyone who was interested he would give his still booming opinion on how the Government was presently being run. “Lousy!” Bill would roar.

The Rifles Ride Again. If impoverished Bill Murray remembered the $4,000, he never mentioned it publicly. But recently some of his old enemies and admirers did. Irvin Hurst, ex-reporter on the Oklahoma City Times, which had fought Alfalfa Bill bitterly when he was governor, got together with some of the capital’s citizens. The Squirrel Rifles was mobilized again. It was a joke, but once again a joke with a point. Commissions in the brigade were offered for a price: $10 for colonelcy, $5 for a majority. Over $1,000 had been collected by this week.

On Alfalfa Bill’s 80th birthday, Chief of Staff Hurst and the Squirrel Rifles had a party for him in the rotunda of the Capitol. On top of a stack of baled alfalfa hay was a birthday cake. The check they presented to him was a good deal short of the $4,000 which Oklahoma owed him, but it would help take care of Alfalfa Bill in his frayed and prideful old age.